


all our times have come

by Spokane



Category: No Country for Old Men (2007)
Genre: Brief suicidal thoughts, Carla Jean’s mix of naivety and utter hopelessness are kinda working for her here, F/M, Feat. Chigurh’s awkward psychopathic behaviors and strict moral code, sharing living space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-12 18:15:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28889700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spokane/pseuds/Spokane
Summary: As fate would have it, waiting for death was as futile as trying to escape it; but Carla Jean has never been very good at either.Post-summer 1980, Carla Jean attempts to move on from a life suddenly intersected by death. Death, however, has different plans. (running with the barest scrap of ambiguity the film provides)
Relationships: Anton Chigurh/Carla Jean Moss, Llewelyn Moss/Carla Jean Moss (mentioned)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 11





	all our times have come

**Author's Note:**

> [title from don’t fear the reaper because of course it is. The ending of the movie was left just ambiguous enough for me to write this- though the wiping of the boots was likely coded to be a dead giveaway…let’s just pretend it’s ritualistic. Carla Jean was the only person to take Chigurh head on and refuse to play by his rules, so I thought that deserved to be expanded on a bit.]

Carla Jean Moss sits motionless on the vanity stool, her brief life passing before her eyes in starts and stops. The stops seemed to badly outweigh the starts, and yet she still remains.

She hasn’t been able to move since he left, the encounter leaving her somehow rooted to the seat. The bizarre hitman sent to her house by seemingly no more than the moral gravity of his own promised threats has left her alone with her thoughts and her life. She can’t say why he didn’t kill her after she rejects his outlandish and cruel game, even as she replays the scene over and over again in her mind. She watches him silently get up, straighten his pants and pass her by as he walks out of the room without another word. She hears the front door swing closed behind him countless times, a looping echo in her head as she sits in silence.

A sharp pounding on the door harshly startles her from her dreamlike state and makes her jump. She has no idea how long she’d been sitting after the man left, but it still didn’t seem like it could be real. Carla Jean supposes the cops must be hot on the man’s trail, and that now she was actually going to have to answer questions- she was going to have to somehow accept the reality of the situation.

She rises to answer the door, but not before the insistent pounder repeats themselves for a second time.

“I’m comin’!” She shouts, her shoes echoing across the floorboards as she strides through the house towards the doorway. The door was still unlocked, like she knew it would be.

She opens the door and the sight that greets her on the other side of the doorway is one of stark terror to her already frayed senses. The man was back, albeit he was bleeding from a head-wound and disheveled, he was no less of a threat than before.

“Oh shit-” Is as far as she gets before the strange man pushes past her. The door swings shut behind him as he stands just on the other side of it, breathing harshly. It’s only now that she notices his left arm hanging in some sort of makeshift sling.

“I need-” The stranger falters. “You’re going to help me.”

“Like hell I am.” Carla Jean spits back at him before she can help herself. She attempts to mentally plan her next move; the back door was still within reach- she can run to the neighbors from there. She makes to turn away, only to feel his hand grip her wrist like an iron vice.

“I’ll come back if you don’t.” It’s the first time he’s ever truly threatened her, but she can hardly pay attention to his words.

“Let me go!” Carla Jean shouts, indignantly attempting to yank her arm free from his grasp.

“You have nothing left to lose.” They were odd words from a man attempting to threaten her into submission, but they somehow cut into her unexpectedly. She was drowning in bills she couldn’t pay, isolated and alone in her grief.

“ No,” She vehemently shakes her head. “I still got my dignity.”

“No, you don’t .” He counters her, his nearly bored tone ill befitting the situation. “ Not really.”

She flounders at his audacity, but he interjects before she finds her tongue again.

“If you help me, I can give you a deal.” The hitman’s strange accent curls between gritted teeth as he speaks to her, but only the barest hint of desperation spills into his tone. “I can pay for all those bills.”

“What bills?” She blinks at him in confusion.

“The-“ For the first time there’s a crack in his demeanor and he makes to shout at her before lowering his voice, but he’s clearly annoyed at her lack of instant clarity. “The ones you said you needed to pay, and more.”

“Yeah? Why should I believe you?”

“I can make you free of it. The payments.” His words hardly made sense and she could feel the grip on her arm shaking, the pain must be nearly overwhelming for him.

“I got a good mind to call the police.” Carla Jean shakes her head but doesn’t step away just yet, even as he releases her arm.

“Then go on.” He motions with his good arm towards the other room. “Go ahead.” There it was. That fearless calm cadence that scared her more than anything, the way he seemed to live entirely without fear. A person like that was capable of anything, for they had nothing to lose.

He’d already let her go once, there would be no cheating fate a second time. If he said he’d be back, she believed it, but more than that she saw _something_ in him. Something she didn’t have fancy words like _dogmatic and dauntless_ for, but she somehow knew if he said something, that’s just how things were going to be. She couldn’t explain it, but that was nothing new. There were countless things she couldn’t explain these days.

“You’re gonna pay those bills then, huh?” She slowly brings her arms up to fold them, unconsciously attempting to gain a measure of bravado back. “I want extra- some left to take myself someplace nice when this is all over.”

Carla Jean surprises herself in her own recklessness. If Llewelyn hadn’t been murdered a few months back, if she hadn’t buried Mama today, if the man hadn’t confronted her with her own mortality earlier… Perhaps she would’ve made a different decision. She had no further skills training beyond high school, no husband and no family that would support her. She was desperate for any sign of hope on the horizon, enough to willingly forgo all moral judgment or sense. This was not a good man she was helping, but perhaps if life had been kinder she wouldn’t have to forestall the weight of her judgement for less desperate times.

“Alright.” Is all he replies.

“Fine. I’ll do it. But you gotta promise me that money- an’ that you won’t kill me.” She acts like she knows perfectly well what she’s just gotten herself into.

He doesn’t dignify her with a promise or anything of the sort, instead tells her what he needed for both the immediate and the future. Surprisingly, the list of things he required not immediately on hand was reduced to splinting supplies and filling the last of Mama’s prescriptions.

She truly didn’t have anything left to lose, either way. He could kill her now, or send someone to kill her later for all she knew.

“You gone and did it now.” Carla Jean murmurs to herself while cleaning out the cluttered medicine cabinet and linen closet in the bathroom, grabbing as much as she can carry. When she returns the man is already seated at the dining room table.

“You need to go to the hospital, really. Can’t see what good this is gonna do.” She tells him as she dumps the supplies onto the table. He doesn’t so much as glance at her. She makes her way past his chair to set a pot of water to boil in the kitchen while simultaneously procuring a bowl of warm water from the sink.

“Somebody do this to you, Mister?” She only now realizes she may have a new problem as she returns with the rest of the supplies and dumps them on the table in a similar fashion. “Are they gonna be coming back lookin’ for you?”

“Stop talking, hand me the rag.” The man says, without any inflection behind the words.

Carla Jean stands in silence in the corner of the room, watching and waiting as the stranger tends to himself, first swallowing a handful of her mother’s pills with water from the bowl before dabbing at his headwound. It was an unhappy coincidence that her mother had some hefty painkillers towards the end to treat pain from an infection caused by the cancer, the highest they could allow.

She watches him remove his shirt, and steps in when he asks her to help him cut the sleeve from his mangled left arm. Carla Jean was taken back to the day her ‘Lil Bit ran in front of a car, crushing his front legs in a mess of bone and blood matted fur. Mama phoned a neighbor who made quick work of her beloved dog’s suffering, but Carla Jean was inconsolable for weeks on end afterwards. The sight of bone and blood weighed heavy on her mind now. She could hardly believe she was doing this.

She couldn’t gauge how long she’d stood, mousey, in the corner of the dining room while trying to look anywhere but him. Waiting until he needed her for something again. She fixates on the fine china adorning the dining room hutch, an angelic girl and her parasol, plates with ornate floral designs, great-grandmama’s best fine blue china snuff box. Her eyes followed the delicate blue pattern of the snuff box, the flowers as the interconnected with leaves and vines and tiny dots. She’d all but dissociated from what was happening in the room- the man digging around in his bloodied mangled arm, the noises he made. Finally, his voice brings her back.

“Push it in, slowly.” He quietly commands, his voice dead calm but forceful. The strange man was pointing at the 2 inches of goddamn bone sticking out of his arm.

“I,” she balks. “What you need to do is go to the hospital, mister. I can’t fix this, I don’t know how.”

“Do it.” He tells her, much like how he’d asked to her call his coin flip, what felt like an eternity ago.

“No, I-” She shakes her head but takes a step forward.

“Just _do_ it.”

She reaches down.

The subsequent events she’d all but blacks out. If he’d cried out in pain or reacted in any way as she clumsily slid the protruding bone through layers of muscle, she can’t recall. There was no way that it could’ve been done correctly but the bone was back inside, and that’s all she knew.

By the end of it they were both somehow breathing heavily as she shakily began to stich up the wound with the sterilized needle and thread. She tried her best to not think about what she was doing as the needle passed through his flesh. He inhaled harshly on each pull but barely flinched otherwise. She didn’t know if she should give him an injection before or after she finished. Mama received injections twice a day for her infection, in the hopes that treating the opportunistic infection would make her last few months more comfortable as the cancer slowly whittled the life out of her. Carla Jean had taken over when the home-nurse became too costly, but never felt comfortable with the injections. Mama always told her that she was doing it wrong, no matter what she tried.

She is on her last stich when a pounding at the door causes her to jump suddenly, jerking the needle into his flesh forcefully and earning her a grunt in response. The pair were motionless and silent for a beat.

“You drove here?” The pain medication he’d taken earlier was apparently having some effect as he sounded exhausted.

“Uhm,” She falters at his odd question. “Yeah. Yeah, I did.”

“Answer it then.”

She doesn’t understand, but nonetheless gets up. She doesn’t know what awaited her on the other side of the door this time. Perhaps it was the police, perhaps it was another assailant come to finish the job. Carla Jean isn’t prepared for either as she opens the front door.

This time there is a young blond officer on the other side of the doorframe and Carla Jean winces once she realizes she has just answered the door in an unmistakable black funeral dress with traces of dried blood on her hands.

“Hey there Miss, I’m sorry to interrupt your evening. Do you know how we could get in touch with a Mr. Morris?”

“Well he lives right ‘cross there.” Carla Jean nods her head at the house across the street. “If he’s not home, I’m not sure where he’s at.”

“Have heard anything or seen anything unusual, Miss? We had reports of a car theft and a hit n’ run in the area.” This was her chance, but the officer looked to be just some well-meaning rookie with no idea what was contained inside her dining room. The man could probably kill him, injured and sedated as he was, Carla Jean suspects he could probably manage it.

Instead she clasps her bloodstained hands behind her back.

“Well I heard some dogs barking earlier down the street, going real crazy- but I can’t say I seen anything unusual.” She lies, hoping to end the conversation.

“And around what time was that?”

“Well let’s see now,” She pauses to think of another lie, she should’ve just said no and left it at that- “It was right after I got home, so I’d say around 4:30.”

“Alright, thank you Ma’am. If you hear anything else please don’t hesitate to call, you have a pleasant evening.” The young officer tips his hat and flashes an innocent smile at her before stepping away as she closes the door.

Carla Jean returns only to find the man and the remaining supplies missing from the table. For the briefest moment she wonders if that was it, if that was all he required. But somehow she knows it’s not over yet- it can’t be. Things were never that simple for her. She searches the house, and finds the guest bedroom door closed. She considers knocking or opening the door- but thinks better of it.

“Must be outta my mind.” She shakes her head as she turns away from the door.

There was no telling how long the stranger would stay, or what further trouble he may bring with him. But freedom from debt meant a chance to restart her spiraling life. It meant there may be a light at the end of the darkness for her- a way out. She would pursue it with everything she had, for there was nothing else for her to do.

* * *

The man stays in her house for weeks, and Carla Jean’s life passes before her in a strange numbing calm. The man had affixed his arm with a roughshod cast that looked removable, probably so that he could aerate the wound underneath. She wondered how he came by the skill of making casts out of household items, and by what miracle the horrific injury was not infected or causing him incapacitating pain. She knew nothing about his origins, what his future plans were, or how those may concern her. She only knew there was a peculiar hitman in her mother’s home; he was there when she left for work in the morning, and he was there when she came home in the evening. And that if he paid her like he said he would- maybe she could face reality and move on with her life, and if he was determined to kill her after all, she didn’t see much she could do to avoid that either.

When she’d moved her stuff from the trailer, the week before Mama died, she’d kept a box of Llewelyn’s clothes. She just didn’t have the heart to do anything with them yet, so they stayed in the basement by the washer and dryer. Carla Jean came home from her evening shift the next night to see they’d been put to use by her wounded home invader, as he stands before her in the kitchen, apparently finishing making himself a sandwich with his usable hand.

“What’s your name?” She demands, after setting the keys on the kitchen counter. It was the first time she’d felt a simmer of anger towards him and her situation, the first emotion fighting against the overwhelming numbness of everything.

“It doesn’t matter.” He flatly tells her.

“It _does_ matter, if you’re gonna be in my house, using things you ain’t got no right to-”

“I told you to forget about it.” The man looks vaguely offended at her attempt to switch power back to herself, this time he fixes her with a frown and a dead-eyed stare.

Switching between having nothing left to lose and clinging to a scrap of self-preservation, Carla Jean decides to let it drop.

* * *

Over the next week she only runs into him sporadically, taking longer shifts at work and coming home after dark but he’s there, of course, she _knows_ he’s there. His presence in the house was impossible to ignore. He was awkward, rude and insidiously menacing, which gave her enough cause avoid him if at all possible during the weeks he recovered in the house. The man was less a man and more a force, but it was the strange duality that he was _just_ a man that Carla Jean supposed she was having the most difficulty with. The small house forced her to contend with his humanity in unsettling ways.

She finds more and more that she wishes he’d killed her, that afternoon in the back bedroom, almost as much as she thinks about killing him. She thinks about it numerous times. How she could do it, how she’d probably fuck it up and he’d end up killing her instead. How it wouldn’t take but a squeeze of a mammoth sized hand and the man would choke her out on the hardwood floor. But more than death, Carla Jean wants that money. Now she understands the pull that plagued Llewelyn, the selfish desperation that maybe she deserved better, that maybe there was a way to cheat the hand that was dealt to her. It was addicting.

She kept Llewelyn’s secrets in life, and she keeps them in death. The fact that there was a hitman in her house because of her late husband stealing drug money was included in those secrets.

“You don’t gotta kill me ‘fore you go. I won’t tell nobody you’re here.” Carla Jean says aloud one night while she religiously performs her nightly ritual of coupon-clipping.

She hears the telltale limping creak of the floor boards behind her, and knows he’s on his way to the kitchen.

“Honestly can’t think of a single person I’d have to tell.” She shakes her head as she carefully snips away at a 2-for-1 deal for hamburger meat. “People up in this here Walmart already don’t like me much, me being new and not married no more. Guess they don’t know what to say.”

“You’ll get the money, I already told you.” The man acknowledging she’d spoken at all almost shocked her.

“M’ just sayin.” She shrugs, neatly folding the clippings into her envelope. “Just in case you change your mind or somethin.”

“There’s nothing to change. It’s the way things are.” His low voice was still behind her, but Carla Jean doesn’t turn around.

“You say that like you have any say in what-” There went that smartass mouth she’d been in trouble for her whole life.

She knew very well what he was capable of, she could feel every time his dead eyes shifted her way. He had control over if she lived or died, and right now she wanted to live, so she cleared her throat and quietly amended, “Yeah… guess it is.”

* * *

It became a bit of a ritual, if she was home early enough she’d sit down at the dining room table after work to clip coupons, and he’d pass her on his way to the kitchen for his nightly meal. He almost always made himself a sandwich around 7pm. She didn’t know what else he did all day, while she was at work, and she didn’t care to ask. Previously, she had attempted to leave dinner out for him on her days off, just to see if he’d eat it, and if she could get him to use less bread for a change. He never touched her meals. 

Tonight as she clips Carla Jean looks up to see the man in the kitchen, stranding with the refrigerator door open and glass quart of milk in his usable hand. She stares at his back as he drinks straight from the bottle.

“You _could_ get a glass, y’ know.” She tells him, unwavering in her boldness. She’d become acclimated to the fact that he could kill her at any second, and the power of fear he’d held over her was quickly fading.

The stranger moves away from the fridge, wiping the milk that had collected comically across his shaven face to look at her. His thick brows were raised at her boldness and his hooded dark eyes widened in what she couldn’t discern was offense or surprise. His expression then flattens as he returns the milk and limps back to the guest bedroom without another word.

* * *

The man rarely initiates conversation, opting instead to pass from room to room in enigmatic silence. The silence no longer frightened Carla Jean as she was growing impossibly used to him. Adaptable as she was, it was only a matter of time before she became accustomed to his presence, in her own way.

Today when she came home, the man was waiting for her and approached her as soon as she’d come in the door.

“Your neighbor came by again, she’s come by twice while you’re at work.” He says without inflection, his accent curling in jagged edges around the words.

“Huh,” Carla Jean didn’t balk as he approached, turning away as she placed her keys on the kitchen hooks. “Wonder what she wants.”

“Ask. So she doesn’t come back again.”

“You think you can just tell me-” By the time she turns to boldly face him, the man had already walked away.

She finds that the elderly neighbor just wanted to check in that everything was alright. Carla Jean promises her it was, and was treated to an hour of reminiscing on Mama’s bridge club. She hasn’t talked to anyone her age outside of work since Mama died, beyond halting small talk. She doesn’t even know what she’d say to them, they’d spend time griping and bragging about their husbands, or drag her out shopping for their newly impending bundles of joy. There had been a few sympathy calls after Mama died, but no one really knew what to say to her, and if they did they seemed too afraid to say it. Everyone who called danced around the subject of Llewelyn, which left precious little to talk about outside of “Your mama was a fine lady, it’s a shame to see her gone so soon,” and “Woohee, it’s dry as a bone out here, how’s the rain up there?”

She starts working doubles to avoid thinking about the telephone.

* * *

It’s an day off on her schedule today and Carla Jean thinks about picking up the phone for the first time in a week, but then it’s somehow 7pm and she still hasn’t touched the receiver. Instead she finds herself carrying a load of laundry down during the commercial break from her evening shows. She passes her sociopathic home invader in the kitchen on her way downstairs, making himself dinner at his usual time.

Her luck only worsens as she takes a bad step and ends up somersaulting down the stairs sending the basket and clothes flying with an undignified yelp. She lands unhurt at the bottom of the stairs, tangled in a heap of clothing. She looks up from the mess to find the man’s head poking around the doorframe, peering down at her from the top of the stairs. An uncomfortably human reaction to the commotion she’d caused. Somehow it’s easier for her to forget there is anything human about him at all, in some way he scares her more when she remembers that he’s just a man; like her husband, like her boss- like _anybody._

“Tripped. M’alright.” Carla Jean grunts as she begins to right herself. He’s still staring at her when she turns and begins to put the clothes back in the basket. Finally she hears him walk away and notices the limp in his step sounds almost gone as she hears the floorboards above her creak with his retreating footsteps.

She’d only just started putting the clothes in the washer before she hears his footsteps return and come pounding down the stairs.

“Wash these.” The man roughly thrusts a pair of shirts towards her with his good arm, tinged with strange grease marks.

“Oh, why thank you _sugar_ , you’re too kind.” Carla Jean offers him a mockery of her best customer-service smile. She wasn’t feeling much in the way of self-preservation’ tonight, let him do his worst- she’d made her peace with it weeks ago.

“It’s Chigurh.” The man inelegantly corrects her, flatly annoyed and fixing her with a dark stare. Like it was something he’d had to say some immeasurable number of times in his lifetime.

“What is?” She wrinkles her nose at the nonsensical statement, but hears him heading back up the stairs without an answer.

It only occurs to her later as she’s preparing for bed that he may have just given her his name- whether he’d intended to or not. He probably thought she was purposefully mispronouncing it, and he was driven by some sort of compulsion to correct her.

* * *

Work had been rough this particular shift, one of the cashiers announced her engagement and another announced her pregnancy. Somehow, Carla Jean just couldn’t be happy for them, she felt as much a stranger looking in on daily interactions from the outside as she imagined the ghosts of her husband and mother would be.

The quiet sounds of the news channel hits her as soon as she walks in the door, reminding her although she was more isolated than ever, she was never truly alone even in this.

“What kind of a name is Shi-geer, anyways? Or was it Shi-gurh?” She passes the man from where he was seated on the couch on her way to her bedroom. She didn’t know what she was hoping for, but she was hoping to provoke _something_.

“I’m not going to hurt you.” There was an unsettling smile, hardly there, underneath his standard dead-eyed expression. He knew what she was trying to do, what she hoped she could make him do, but it apparently it didn’t agree with his own personal moral system, somehow.

She pauses in her stride to face him. “I don’t know that for certain.”

“You do.” He tells her, not looking up from the screen.

“How?”

“If I was meant to kill you, you would already be dead.” He responds easily, as if it were as much an inescapable fact as the sunrise.

When she came back out to watch her shows, he’d retreated to the back bedroom as he usually did when she came home. The warmth he’d left behind on the couch was the only evidence he’d been there at all.

* * *

Tonight after work Carla Jean sits and eats her shake n’ bake leftovers at the dining room table, listening to the night chatter of the insects in the yard. The stranger comes in carrying his nightly sandwich plate with his good arm and sits down across from her. He never acknowledges her presence, like she’s just another porcelain figure in the room. But she’s long past any expectations of normalcy from him. 

“That arm needs better mending.” She says, deciding that if he’s going to sit down at the same table as her in her house, then she has every right to speak with him.

“Yes it does.” Is his only response.

“Are you gonna get it set proper? I bet they’d gotta break it again.”

“Yes.” She‘s surprised that he bothers to respond at all this time.

Pushing her luck, Carla Jean decides to try something else, something that had long been on her mind. She thought she knew the answer, but there was always something about being unsure that bothered her.

“Did you,” She starts, before she clears her throat and tries again. “Did you kill Llewelyn?”

Chigurh takes another bite of sandwich, and unhurriedly chews while Carla Jean waits.

“No.” His affect remains an absolute flatline.

She tries to keep eating and hide how his response affected her, however she finds herself pausing midbite at his words before she realizes it. He could be lying, but somehow she doesn’t think he is. “Do you know who did?”

“The Mexicans.”

“Oh.” Carla Jean takes a moment to process what that meant. “Are you one of them?”

“You already asked me that.” He retorted quickly, before taking another bite. For a moment she was stunned, he seemed perfectly lucid- but his answer was nonsensical. To her knowledge she hadn’t asked him anything of the sort.

“Are you Mexican?” Carla Jean decides to try his tactic, repeating the same question until she received an answer that was satisfactory- but tried a different way. “ You have an accent of some kind, I hear it.”

He looks up then, but his eyes aren’t _quite_ on hers. She can feel them on her face, somewhere. He blinks his dead eyed stare and keeps eating.

“What do you think I am?”

“I dunno.” She puts her knife and fork down and slouches back in her seat. “But I don’t think you’re no Mexican. You wouldn’ta addressed them that way if you was.”

“Mmm,” He hums as he got up, scraping his chair along the hardwood floor. He takes his empty plate to the kitchen with his un-splinted arm and retreats to the back bedroom. Once again leaving Carla Jean alone with her thoughts.

* * *

Tonight Chigurh interrupts her nightly coupon clipping at the dining room table by unceremoniously shoving her mother’s best sewing scissors across the table towards her.

“I need you to cut my hair.”

“That’s no way to ask.” Carla Jean knows it won’t do any good, but she at least owes it to herself to put up the front. That’s the dance they’ve settled into. She defies him, and he somehow looks at her like an ant that had the audacity to object to being smashed under a boot, every single time.

“Cut it.” He repeats, with no meaningful inflection.

“Fine,” She huffs and gets up to move towards the bathroom. With one arm Chigurh drags a chair from the dining room as he follows her and sits down.

“So,” Carla Jean stares down uneasily at the man seated before her. “What do you want me to do?”

“Why do people always-” He starts before trailing off with a diminutive shake of his head. “Cut it.”

“You said that.” Carla Jean deadpans.” But how am I cuttin’ it here? How much?”

“I’ll tell you when to stop.”

“ _Okay_.” She picks up the scissors and mumbles in a voice barely audible. “That’s real specific.” She begins cutting in the smallest increments possible.

As she works through his shaggy dark locks Carla Jean pulls them away from his neck, exposing the palely tanned flesh mere millimeters away from the glistening metal edge of her scissors.

“I could just cut right into your neck with these.” She muses aloud.

“You could.”

“But then I wouldn’t get my money would I?”

“Nope.” Carla Jean can’t really see it, but it sounds like the man could’ve almost been smiling.

“Didn’t think so. Mighty nice insurance plan you got there, _Chigurh_.” She keeps using the name she thought he might’ve dropped that day in the basement, in the hopes of getting a reaction.

“That your first name?” She asks, but this time, he doesn’t have an answer for her.

“Stop.” He tells her, after about an inch of hair has been removed and litters the stark white tiling at their feet.

Carla Jean doesn’t think to grab the comb, instead runs her hand directly through his hair to shake out the lose bits and straighten her cut. She gives pause when she feels its uncanny silkiness beneath her fingers and the touch suddenly feels jarringly intimate and inappropriate as she immediately wipes her hand on her shorts to purge herself of it.

“There you go,” she makes to set the scissors down before he stops her.

“A little more in the front. Please.”

She sighs but relents, until he is satisfied with her work and they part ways until their next encounter.

* * *

She returns home from work one afternoon and an unusual autumn rainstorm was rolling in, dark clouds rolled heavy over the parched yellowing landscape. The curtains billowed in the wind, the faint ruffling providing the only sound in the eerie stillness. Walking into the kitchen she finds the back door wide open, and Chigurh standing at the edge of the back patio. His bare feet touched the tips of the grass from where it pushed into the edges of the concrete and his gaze was firmly fixed on the sky overhead.

Curious, Carla Jean steps out into the yard and seats herself on back steps, staring up at the sky as the heavy dark clouds roiled overhead. Her hair catches in the wind and thunder softly rolls across the sky before finishing with a deep concussive rumble. She looks over, but the man doesn’t acknowledge her, keeping his dead eyes firmly planted skyward. She squints at the darkness in the clouds, searching for what he sees in them. She wants to see what he sees, detach herself from any natural inclinations towards the oncoming storm; fear, foreboding and dread. Death and bills and bills and death- and being left behind. She yearns for a freedom from grief, doubt and desolation. She wonders if she sees it, if she could be crazy like that. If it was in her nature.

The sudden downpour startles her back to herself, the driving rain blowing onto the porch and wetting her uniform vest, causing it to stick uncomfortably to her shirt. She makes to go back inside, having had more than enough. She didn’t see shit in that sky, but was now unpleasantly wet and clammy.

Carla Jean looks back from the open back door to see Chigurh still at the edge of the patio, staring up at the sky. He smiles as it soaks him down, causing his hair to stick to his face and neck in thick strands.

“…Jesus.” She can only mutter and shake her head as she makes her way back into the kitchen. That man was truly crazy, in ways she couldn’t even guess at.

All in all, the storm ends up knocking the power out of the area for the day, but more than that the power surge finally fries the aging TV in her mother’s bedroom. Carla Jean can’t afford a replacement until she finishes paying for the funeral that buried her mother into the welcoming enteral abyss of cool earth.

* * *

The man is watching the news when Carla Jean steps into the living room tonight, fresh from a shower. She sits down next to him on the couch, precariously close. She can’t put her finger on why she does it, she’s always been impulsive that way. She just wants to see what happens and it hardly matters now, these days she doesn’t have much of a life to lose.

The hot-shower reddened bare skin of her thigh touches his pants, and for a while she leaves it at that. He doesn’t speak or turn his head away from the screen. The newscaster is doing that thing newscasters do to make the sudden rash of disappearing women in El Paso sound as common and ordinary as the weather for the next week. He cautions residents in a steadfast unwavering tone against the forces of everyday evil, it was the world they lived in. People did terrible things every day. 

Carla Jean pushes further, almost unbelievably far, draping her full weight against the strange man without warning.

“What are you doing?” Chigurh askes her, without looking at her. If he is even slightly alarmed or confused by her actions, she can’t hear it in his voice.

“I’m just real tired.” She feigns innocence, leaning her head against him.

“Then go to bed.” He sighs, sounding unbelievably bored with her.

She considers not moving, just to see if she can make him as uncomfortable as he’d made her, but then realizes he no longer rattled her. There was truly nothing he could do that would frighten her anymore.

She thought of the unusual silhouette his face cut against the darkened sky, the way he watched it, the way he saw something no one else could. She blinks through tears that refuse to come, staring at her mother’s collection of porcelain figures on the shelf near the TV. She thinks maybe she gets it now. The detachment, the ever present loneliness that she’s not sure she can feel anymore, unable to discern the feeling from the general crushing weight of a life suddenly intersected by death.

She gets up and prepares for bed, still hearing the muffled sounds of the TV as she slides between the sheets.

In her dream tonight Carla Jean dies, just like she has every night for the past week. The dreams were becoming more and more persistent, but always the same.

She’s at work, somehow mortally wounded but doesn’t realize it until she sees blood soaking through her clothes. She drags herself through the stark white linoleum aisles, the harsh lighting making the blood shine ethereally as it ebbed from her side and onto the flooring. Costumers passed her without a second glance, as if they couldn’t see what she saw. She called for help, begged for someone to call her an ambulance, all to no avail. Her voice felt small and choked, and what sounds she made went ignored. She felt no pain, but started to feel the blood loss take over her senses as she dropped to the floor, costumers simply walking around her on their way. She stared up at ceiling as the industrial lighting began to dim and the darkness took over her vision. But tonight the dream was different, tonight she opened her eyes again- and she was home. She was at her wedding, she was sitting on the front porch with mama, she was sitting down to watch the news with Llewelyn in their double wide, and he was talking to her- low and slowly. “What took you so long, keepin me waiting Carla Jean-”

She doesn’t jump awake this time. Instead she merely opens her eyes in the darkness, tangled and sweaty in the sheets. The clock reads 3:30 and against the cacophony of night insects Carla Jean slips from the bed. The cool hardwood floor on her feet adds to the chill of the sweat drying on her skin as she tip toes through the house to the back bedroom.

The door creaks slightly as she opens it and she can make out the silhouette of the Chigurh laying in in bed, appearing to be doing what any normal man would be doing at this hour- sleeping.

“I want you to kill me.” She says plainly, stepping into the room and making her way towards him.

He doesn’t startle upon waking, if he was even asleep to begin with. Her presence doesn’t dignify so much of a change in his breathing. Him sitting up to rigidly prop himself up against pillows is the only indication she has that he even acknowledges her presence.

“Yeah, I’m ready.” She nods to herself. “Shouldn’t be too hard, I mean you sure seemed real keen on it earlier.”

“Why do you want to die, Carla Jean?” His voice is hoarser and deeper than usual with sleep, but he still picks every syllable of her name apart, clear as glass.

“I’m suppose’ to die. I seen it. Everyone I cared about is gone. I wanna be with them.” Carla Jean then crawls onto him in the bed, almost trance like in each purposeful fatalistic movement.

“Guess I’m too much of a coward to do it m’self. Maybe it’s like you and that coin making those choices for you. I need you to do it.”

“Go back to your bed.” He speaks slowly, like he was speaking to a very young child.

“I ain’t going. I made up my mind.” She digs her heels in.

For a while there was nothing but bizarre silence between them. Carla Jean awkwardly invading his space, in the hopes of earning herself a swift end to a short meaningless life in the form of a violent retaliation. Instead she feels the hairs on the back of her neck begin to prickle upon suddenly becoming acutely aware that she was sitting directly on his genitals. She feels the bare outline of him against herself underneath the thin sheets.

Her breath catches in her throat and she goes very still, on the edge of something. Something she lacked words for. She applies a bit more pressure to the area, testing to see what would happen, how far she could go. Ever since she was a little girl she liked to push, breaking the arms off the Mother Mary statue, getting paddled at school for asking blasphemous questions, getting married at 18 to a man almost twice her age, pushing Llewelyn to the edge during a fight just to see what he’d-

The man’s voice broke the spiral. “Are you aroused?”

“I dunno.” Is all she can muster.

“Are you aroused?” Chigurh repeats verbatim, upon not receiving a satisfactory answer. 

She exhales deeply, accepting the reality of the situation and pushes back. “ _Yes_.”

“Why?”

“ I don’t know.” She lowers her voice further.

“Why are you arous-” He makes to repeat himself before Carla Jean tries to kiss him into silence. While she succeeds in silencing him, the man doesn’t respond to her actions. His lips are completely still as she clumsily tries to work hers over his. She can feel slight stubble against her face from where she rubs up against it.

Eventually she pulls back, waiting for reality to intercede. But it only seems to have the opposite effect on her, driving her deeper into something unnamable. He was getting hard underneath the sheets, Carla Jean could feel it now. He was somehow still capable of human reactions, if only as a unconscious result of her stimulation.

“Ain’t scared of you no more, I got nothing to lose.” She doesn’t really know what she means by it.

She can see the glint of the ambient lights of the neighborhood reflected in his dark eyes. She’d spent weeks looking at them, they were hooded and impossibly dark and deep but, she’d never really seen them for what they were. There was something else there, something fatalistic about them. Like the doped eyes of a terminal patient, surviving only on strong painkillers and the slow decay of time. Carla Jean realizes she knows them well.

She impulsively pulls the sheets back and is confronted with the outline of his erection from where it strained against his briefs. She reaches out to touch it through the rough fabric, hot against her fevered skin. The man says nothing, but she notices a tiny twitch in his leg when she cups her hand against him.

“What’re you gonna do now?” She murmurs, low enough it was nearly impossible to be perceived. If he heard her, she doesn’t wait for his answer before she slides the material down. The man remains catatonic, even as his cock springs up towards her. He’s thick and veined and bigger than the only other man she’d ever been with, but Carla Jean isn’t interested in comparing the two.

“You gonna let me do this?” In a swift motion she pulls her nightgown over her head and bares herself to him. The night air was stifling inside the stuffy house, but she still felt her flesh pimple and rise with the sudden exposure.

“I think you know the answer to that.” Chigurh finally speaks.

“But, _should_ I do it?”

“I can’t make that decision for you.” He tells her, with the same voice he told her everything else.

“Was kinda hoping you would.” But she moves herself back on top of him before she can think twice about it.

She felt like a force of nature, with him underneath her, like a wave crashing against the shoreline, a fate that cannot be stopped. She can feel him just there, hot against her outer lips and the anticipation makes her even more wet. Llewelyn used to love this shit, her on top, just going crazy for him. But she loved it when he’d take her back and fuck her in their tangled sheets, after she’d run her mouth a little too much, the scent of his sweat mixing with hers. But that chapter of her life was closed now. The young widowed wife of Llewelyn Moss dies a final slow death as Carla Jean slowly slides herself down.

At first he stretches her almost to the point of discomfort, but she’s slick enough to take it. She seats herself fully on him before she grinds herself forward, putting pressure on all the right places. He doesn’t react to her lack of movement, allowing her to use him to her own end, at her own pace. She starts to ride him, slowly at first, but gaining momentum as she goes. She only goes part of the way down each time to avoid overwhelming herself, before finally taking him all the way.

The man rewards her with a grunt as she clenches herself around him and she briefly wonders if he would kill her if she stopped now. She doubts it would even matter to him, nothing else seemed to.

She situates herself closer to him, leaning her upper half down to where he was propped against the pillows and resting their bare chests together. For the first time he seems to consciously acknowledge her actions as he rests his head in the crook of her neck, breathing though what sounds like gritted teeth. He starts to move his hips underneath hers, tiny halting movements to drive himself deeper inside her, seeking his own sensations. The man was at least able to perceive what felt good to him, and merely coincidentally what felt good to her.

“Oh god-” She felt herself getting close.

The man takes one deep breath and she swears she feels a hand on her back, pulling her down to him. On his next breath he comes, the air leaving as a shudder in his breathing. But more than that Carla Jean can feel it inside her now, sticky and hot. She’s right there, she can feel it as she grinds herself against him to put pressure right where she needs it- and suddenly she feels that rapturous rush of warmth and rhythmic throbbing; the one she didn’t even know her body was capable of until Llewelyn helped coax it out of her for the first time.

In the immediate afterglow she collapses against him, panting into his shoulder. She is still just long enough to feel his chest rise and fall, it’s only slightly elevated in its rhythm but its enough to ground her back into the reality of what she’d just done. Reality trickled in as she felt him seeping out of her, and she felt the heat leaving just as quickly as it’d come. Carla Jean scrambles to her feet and flees the room without another word or backwards glance.

She perfunctorily cleans herself off in the bathroom before redonning her nightgown and returning to bed, cocooning herself between the soft sheets of what used to be her mother’s bed.

Sleep finds her easier than it has any right to.

The next day she searches the house after she wakes, but the man is gone, without a single trace. Somewhere deep inside herself, Carla Jean knew he would be. When she tries to explain her own inexplicable decisions herself later, she wonders if she did it because wanted to be closer to him, if she’d hoped to connect and by some measure become more alike. But instead he only seemed to remind her that she was still alive.

Somehow she would face the next day, and the next and the next. It would seem that waiting for death as futile as scrambling to escape it, _so she might as well live._

* * *

It wasn’t until months later that she notices a package sitting on the front porch while coming home from work one evening. It was unremarkable in its size and markings until she ripped through the initial band of tape. She realizes what it is right away. It was what was promised.

She glances down at herself and adjusts the stretching elastic of her waistline before turning her eyes towards the darkening sky above her and grinning.

The last vestiges of the setting sun broke through the clouds, and the future smiled back.


End file.
